A meteorologist told a bunch of farmers in New Zealand last week that global warming will be a joke within five years:
"We're all going to survive this. It's all going to be a joke in five years," [Augie Auer] said.
I think the guy's optimistic. Global warming has been around almost 20 years and I don't think it's going to go the way of global cooling very easily. But Auer is correct:
A combination of misinterpreted and misguided science, media hype, and political spin had created the current hysteria and it was time to put a stop to it.
"It is time to attack the myth of global warming," he said.
According to Auer, that myth is:
Water vapour was responsible for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, an effect which was vital to keep the world warm, he explained . . .
The other greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, and various others including CFCs, contributed only five per cent of the effect, carbon dioxide being by far the greatest contributor at 3.6 per cent.
However, carbon dioxide as a result of man's activities was only 3.2 per cent of that, hence only 0.12 per cent of the greenhouse gases in total. Human-related methane, nitrogen dioxide and CFCs etc made similarly minuscule contributions to the effect: 0.066, 0.047 and 0.046 per cent respectively.
"That ought to be the end of the argument, there and then," he said.
Meanwhile, Jim Imhofe's "EPW Press Blog" has a post (written by Marc Morano) reporting on all the scientists who believed in man-made global warming but are now doubters or even--gasp--deniers:
[I]t is an opportune time to examine the recent and quite remarkable momentum shift taking place in climate science. Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics. The names included below are just a sampling of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media driven “consensus” on man-made global warming.
Included on the list is Dr. Claude Allegre [links original]:
"By burning fossil fuels, man enhanced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Allegre wrote 20 years ago. In addition, Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who signed a November 18, 1992 letter titled “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity” in which the scientists warned that global warming’s “potential risks are very great.”
But now Allegre says:
[T]he cause of climate change is "unknown" and accused the “prophets of doom of global warming” of being motivated by money, noting that "the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!" “Glaciers’ chronicles or historical archives point to the fact that climate is a capricious phenomena. This fact is confirmed by mathematical meteorological theories. So, let us be cautious,” Allegre explained in a September 21, 2006 article in the French newspaper L'EXPRESS.
And this isn't some kooky former vice president. The Canada National Post describes Allegre as:
"[Having] the highest environmental credentials. The author of early environmental books, he fought successful battles to protect the ozone layer from CFCs and public health from lead pollution.” Allegre now calls fears of a climate disaster "simplistic and obscuring the true dangers” mocks "the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man's role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters."
And Allegre is just one of a dozen former true believers who are now apostates in the Global Warming Taliban religion.
It would be nice if Auer's prediction is right and in five years global warming will be a joke. I don't think it will be. Maybe another ten years. But by then how many people will be impoverished by kooky schemes to solve a problem that may not exist, and if does exist, can't be solved through human action?
Too damn many, if it's even one.
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